Hugo and Nebula first-time winners

The Hugo
and Nebula awards for the year 2001 were unusual in that none of the
winners had ever received either award for fiction before. The Hugos
went to Dave Langford (who had previously won a number of Hugos in
non-fiction categories), J.K. Rowling, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Jack
Williamson; and the Nebulas went to Catherine Asaro, Severna Park,
Kelly Link and Jack Williamson again.

This has
been a very rare occurrence in the recent history of either award. Of
course, in the early years, it was normal for awards to go to
first-time winners, so all Hugos for the years 1953, 1955, 1956, 1958,
and 1959, and all the Nebulas for 1965, 1966, 1968, and 1971 went to
authors who had not previously won the respective awards. Since then,
first-timers swept the board for the Hugos in 1984 (David Brin, for Startide
Rising; Greg Bear, for "Blood Music"; Octavia E. Butler, for
"Speech Sounds"; and Timothy Zahn, for "Cascade Point") and 1996 (Allen
Steele, for "The Death of Captain Future"; James Patrick Kelly, for
"Think Like a Dinosaur"; Maureen F. McHugh, for "The Lincoln Train";
and Neal Stephenson for The Diamond Age). First-timers also won
all the Nebulas in 1983 (David Brin, for Startide Rising again;
Gardner Dozois, for "The Peacemaker"; and Greg Bear, for both "Blood
Music" and "Hardfought").

Basically,
the Nebula awards are more widely distributed. 201 Hugos for fiction
have been won by 93 different authors; the 167 Nebulas have been won by 97 different authors.

Hugo and
Nebula winners by gender

The 138
authors who have won either Hugo or Nebula include 40 (30%) women,
winning 101 of the 368 awards (27%). 20 women have won Hugo awards
(22%)
and 34 have won Nebulas (35%). 41 of 201 Hugo awards (20%) have gone to
women, and 60 of 167 Nebula awards (36%). Anne McCaffrey was the first
woman to win either award, picking up both Hugo and Nebula for 1968
(Kate Wilhelm also won a Nebula in 1968). Note that the Hugos had been
started around a decade earlier than the Nebulas. Since then, the Hugos
have delivered all-male winners in the fiction categories in 1969,
1971, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1986, 1987, 1998, 2002 and 2003. The Nebula
winners for fiction were all male in 1970, 1975, 1979, 1983, and 1993.
Neither has yet produced an all-female set of winners in any year, the
Hugos managing three out of five (due to a tie for Best Novel) in 1993,
and the Nebulas managing three out of four in 1987, 1989, 1992, 1995,
1997, 1999, 2001, 2004 and 2005. In the last ten years
(ie Nebulas dated 1996-2005, Hugos 1997-2006) women have won 23 of 40
Nebulas (57.5%) but only 9 out of 40 Hugos (22.5%).